Microsoft Office Live Beta debut and NASCAR


Have you ever noticed that drug dealers and software developers both refer to their clients as "users"....



What do NASCAR and cached DataSets have in common?

According to old friend Chris Falter, it's a predilection for race conditions. Or, to use the NASCAR analogy, as the number of cars on the race track increase, the probability of wrecks increases dramatically.


And now, the Office Live Debut . . .

http://officelive.microsoft.com/

I got an invite so I went on and looked around. Looks pretty interesting. Just snagged a domain name for free and started playing around with the web site designer.

This could be useful for small businesses, Developers could use it as a tool to get in the door if Microsoft supports it right. We'll see what happens.

The BETA includes:


  1. A company domain name»

  2. A hosted Web site with 30 MB of storage

  3. Five free e-mail accounts with 2 GB of storage each

  4. Basic Web analysis tools




The Basics package is really just a website deal, indistinguishable from the thousands of others already in the marketplace. Collaboration looks like SharePoint rolled out once again as a shared service. And Essentials is the other two combined, with FrontPage access. It has reporting and other little trinkets thrown in. Yeesh! I have to wonder if Microsoft really believes this offering is going to make a difference in the marketplace? I mean, sure it's easy to set up -- "Website and presence for dummies 101" -- but where's the extensibility? How am I gonna hook it into a Database?


N.B. - 4/12/2006:
Well! The first thing I found out is that I can't upload an image from behind a corporate firewall!

I see the domain is hooked up, peterbromberg.net Maybe when I get more time, I'll do something with it. I can see this might have some
value for a small business. But I'd like to see more of a hookup for developers so they could "do stuff" for an Office Live client and earn fees.

Incidentally, if you have more interest in this, I see that Paul Thurrott has a nice writeup on it with a bit more of the history lesson.


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